fix: batch of 5 small contributor fixes — PortAudio, SafeWriter, IMAP, thread lock, prefill by teknium1 · Pull Request #2466 · NousResearch/hermes-agent

teknium1 · 2026-03-22T11:40:09Z

Batch salvage of 5 small, clean fixes from open PRs:

#2440 (@itenev) — Better error message when PortAudio is missing: shows apt install libportaudio2 / brew install portaudio instead of generic error.

#2431 (@Bartok9) — Catch ValueError in _SafeWriter alongside OSError. Subagent thread teardown can close stdout between writes, raising "I/O operation on closed file" instead of broken pipe.

#2289 (@Mibayy) — Guard IMAP search results: data and data[0] instead of just data[0]. Prevents IndexError when IMAP returns empty list.

#2288 (@Mibayy) — Add self._lock around session_count() and message_count() in SessionDB. Other methods already use the lock; these two didn't.

#2129 (@ygd58) — Strip trailing empty assistant messages before API calls. Responses API reasoning-only turns leave empty assistant messages that cause prefill rejection on Chat Completions / Anthropic.

All authorship preserved.

When sounddevice is installed but libportaudio2 is not present on the system, the OSError was caught together with ImportError and showed a generic 'pip install sounddevice' message that sent users down the wrong path. Split the except clause to give a clear, actionable message for the OSError case, including the correct apt/brew commands to install the system library.

When subagents run in ThreadPoolExecutor threads, the shared stdout handle can close between thread teardown and KawaiiSpinner cleanup. Python raises ValueError (not OSError) for I/O operations on closed files: ValueError: I/O operation on closed file The _SafeWriter class was only catching OSError, missing this case. Changes: - Add ValueError to exception handling in write(), flush(), and isatty() - Update docstring to document the ThreadPoolExecutor teardown scenario Fixes #2428

imap.uid('search') can return data=[] when the mailbox is empty or has no matching messages. Accessing data[0] without checking len first raises IndexError: list index out of range. Fixed at both call sites in gateway/platforms/email.py: - Line 233 (connect): ALL search on startup - Line 298 (fetch): UNSEEN search in the polling loop Closes #2137

…unt() Both methods accessed self._conn without self._lock, breaking the thread-safety contract documented on SessionDB (line 111). All 22 other DB methods use with self._lock — these two were the only exceptions. In the gateway's multi-threaded environment (multiple platform reader threads + single writer) this could cause cursor interleaving, sqlite3.ProgrammingError, or inconsistent COUNT results. Closes #2130

…to prevent prefill rejection

Reverts the sanitizer addition from PR #2466 (originally #2129). We already have _empty_content_retries handling for reasoning-only responses. The trailing strip risks silently eating valid messages and is redundant with existing empty-content handling.